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A Lie Detector Test for Online Review (repost link)

Well, the article is about online reviews for consumer electronics and the likes, which are products that could potentially inflict some serious “buyer’s remorse”.

However, it somehow reminds me of certain less-than-sincere approaches to writing reviews on anime titles… There is no money involved for this one of course, but people sometimes seem determined to keep their true feeling to themselves. Come on, we all know you’ve shed a couple of tears watching 5cm/s, and get emotionally attached to those “cheap romantic plots” more than once!

A quote from the article:

“At Cornell University, researchers focused on finding semantic tics unique to fake reviews. Like the Texan, they went online and hired people to write 400 fake reviews of hotels. Then they used a computer model to compare those reviews with 400 real ones. The truthful reviews tended to talk about the actual physical space, using specific nouns like “floor” and adjectives like “small.” Since spammers weren’t familiar with the look of the hotel, they spent more time talking about themselves, the reasons they went on a trip, and their traveling companions. “The word ‘husband’ is very indicative of deception,” says Myle Ott, a PhD candidate and co-author of the study. When the researchers trained a computer to look for the linguistic signs, it detected 90 percent of the fake reviews. Ott says several websites, including TripAdvisor, have inquired about the team’s findings. ”